Lori Johnston and Lew Abernathy were planning another swim in two and a half miles of water, and this time I would join them, once the second Mir was away.
An hour and a half behind Titanic time, in New York, Paddy Brown arrived at 3 Truck’s engine bay and wrote, “0800 Capt Brown RFD [reporting for duty]” in the journal.
Half an hour earlier, at 7:30 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 had prepared to take its position on the Logan Airport runway in Boston. The California-bound Boeing 767 was specifically outfitted with extended-range fuel tanks, for a total capacity of twenty-four thousand gallons. Aboard was Paige Farley-Hackel.
Farley-Hackel was a spiritual adviser and family counselor who had achieved some fame in California with a radio show titled Spiritually Speaking. Before traveling to the East Coast with her best friend, Ruth McCourt, and McCourt’s four-year-old daughter, Juliana (who was also Farley-Hackel’s goddaughter), Farley-Hackel sent twelve unusual letters to people she counseled, saying, “You’re doing well. We’ve accomplished everything we need to accomplish together.”
Farley-Hackel’s letters, according to her mother, Marjorie, had caused some recipients to wonder if she were recently diagnosed with a serious illness; Marjorie assured (then and later) that her daughter did not know anything was going to happen to her. “She had no premonition, just a sense that it was time for them to move on.”
“I’m just like a butterfly, Mom,” Farley-Hackel had said. “So even if anything ever should happen to me, and you see butterflies around, just imagine it’s me.”
After the 9/11 attacks, Marjorie planted flowers that were known to attract butterflies. They brought a measure of comfort and closeness, the always present butterflies in “Paige’s garden.”
Just before 8 a.m. in the New York and Boston time zone, while Mir-1 was sealed and prepared for hoisting from its bay on a crane, Farley-Hackel could have looked across the runway from her plane to United Airlines Flight 175, where her friend McCourt was on board with Juliana.
Juliana was a “miracle baby.” McCourt had been told it was unlikely that she and her husband would ever be able to have a child. But Juliana was conceived and born perfectly healthy and cheerful.
So far, this had been a morning of what were supposed to be only brief good-byes. McCourt’s husband was being delayed in Boston by a new series of business commitments, and he had kissed his wife and his daughter good-bye at the airport. For Juliana’s sake, McCourt and Farley-Hackel had taken some of the sting out of the little girl’s missing Daddy by promising a visit to Disneyland after they arrived on the West Coast. Then Farley-Hackel had said good-bye and boarded a separate plane in order to take advantage of a frequent-flyer upgrade. The two women planned to meet again at the airport in Los Angeles.
At 7:58 a.m., two minutes before Paddy Brown signed in, and while Mir-1 prepared to hit water, Flight 11 was accelerating down a Logan Airport runway. It was airborne at 7:59 a.m. Flight 175 followed at 8:14, and lifted off at 8:15.
On this morning, the temporary separation, brought about by a frequent-flyer upgrade, meant that Paige Farley-Hackel would die within the same one-fiftieth of a second as my cousin Donna in the North Tower and nearly seventeen minutes before Ruth McCourt and her little girl, Juliana.
About the time that Flight 175 became airborne, Lori Johnston emerged from the communications shack, and we made sure that the two Titanic crosses were secure in the Mir-2’s specimen basket. The Mir-1 was now set for launch in forty-five minutes. The Mir-2 would follow an hour later, and then we would take our two-and-a-half-mile swim. The swim was planned as a sort of decompression break for Johnston, who had spent a particularly long shift in the communications shack, monitoring my dive the day before.
I had volunteered to “take the coms” (the communications desk) after the Mirs were on their way down and give Johnston a long-overdue break. In addition to monitoring my dive, our endless debates about such arcane matters as precisely where, in rusticle biology, a line could be drawn between geochemical structure and truly biological structures, were bound to be tiring even for übergeeks.
I did not feel tired, but I must have been, for I did a rather dumb thing, I can say in hindsight. Scientists collect samples; scientists do not leave them behind. During the last three minutes, before it was time for us to depart the Mir bay, I ran back to the lab and filled a cloth bag with our reference samples of rope and microsamples of “bio-wedged” wrought-iron railing—all of them—and placed the bag in the “return to Titanic” tray.
“No,” Johnston said, but she and Abernathy both saw that my eyes were full of tears. I did not know why. Johnston asked me again about hearing the silent voices, and I did not answer.
We put the bag in the tray with the crosses and sent it down.
16
Falling Stars
On the 98th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, my cousin Donna was, through a random swerve of history, so recently transferred from a much smaller building to the target area of the attack that she wondered if she would ever get accustomed to the view. Her office faced west, overlooking the Hudson River. On a clear day such as this, had she been looking toward Newark Liberty International Airport, Donna should have been able to see United Airlines Flight 93 taking off at 8:42 a.m., headed for San Francisco but targeted for hijacking (it is believed, to crash into the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.), and bound for legend in the largely unknown farmlands of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
United 93 was nearly a quarter mile below the upper floors of the Twin Towers, at the moment it lifted off the runway in Newark, New Jersey. At the same moment, Flight 11 was barely more than four minutes away from a direct impact into the offices of Marsh & McLennan, at 8:46:40 a.m. No cell phone calls were ever to be heard from any Marsh & McLennan shock cocoons (places that remain eerily undamaged in the midst of explosive events). Death in those offices was universal, instantaneous, and painless. In time, I would be able to live with that.
Ruth McCourt’s brother, Ron Clifford, was about to become one of that day’s Charles Joughins. Along with equities trader Welles Crowther and a patent attorney named Paul Hoffman (and many whose heroic actions might be recorded by history, but not their names), Clifford immediately joined the rescue effort. He would always imagine his sister, during those last minutes of Flight 175, showing nothing except strength for little Juliana, speaking soothingly and cradling the four-year-old’s head against her chest as the smoke trail from the North Tower and then the undamaged South Tower came sweeping into view.
At the moment that his sister and his niece died, Clifford was propping up a burn victim from the first impact, guiding the woman through the lobby of the Marriott Hotel. The hotel was located directly between the feet of the two towers. Clifford had been about to enter the open spaces of the South Tower’s ground floor when the crash of Flight 175 rocked the Marriott to its foundations, as if the building had been located between the prongs of a giant tuning fork.
A firefighter took hold of the burn victim and began guiding her away. A minute later, Clifford was headed back where he had seen other injured people, but he paused to seek out a phone, knowing that all of this must be breaking news on major networks and that his mother would be worried. He wanted to let her know he was safe.